Doctor Lost 12 Years of Memories in Crash, Forgetting Sons’ Childhood and Mom’s Death. He Saw It as a 'Second Chance'

• Dr. Pierdante Piccioni was a successful physician in Italy when, one day in 2013, his vehicle went off the road and crashed — leaving him with a serious brain injury

• When he woke up from his coma, he discovered he had lost 12 years of his memories

• His journey to to recover has inspired the new Fox medical drama Doc

Dr. Pierdante Piccioni has no memory of the 2013 crash that left him in a coma for a few hours. He also has no memories of the 12 years before that.

He does remember his family coming to visit him at the hospital and the surreal moment when he couldn’t recognize his adult sons standing in front of him.

In Piccioni’s mind, the date was still Oct. 25 2001, and his younger son, Tommaso, was turning 8.

“They weren’t my guys. I expected to see two children, 8 and 11, and these adults [20 and 23] came to me,” Piccioni tells PEOPLE from his home in Pavia, Italy. “I had two cheerful children and these others came in saying, ‘Hi Papa’ and I was like ‘Who are you?’ ”

Due to the crash — when Piccioni went off the road — he suffered a serious injury to his cerebral cortex.

Lost among his dozen years of memories were much of his time with his children, Filippo and Tommaso, and his wife, Maria Assunta Zanetti, as well as his path to becoming the head of emergency services in Lodi, Italy.

Not long after waking up from his coma, he asked to see his mother — and was told she had died. He was unfamiliar with recent technology, including cell phones and medical advances.

Piccioni began a diary about his journey between his two existences. His Italian-language memoir, Meno Dodici (or “minus twelve”), became the basis of the hit Italian series Doc - Nelle tue mani.

“‘Minus 12’ is my little joke,” he explains. “I am 65 — less 12.”

Fox’s new medical drama Doc, which premiered this month and stars Molly Parker, was inspired by Piccioni’s experiences. In addition to weekly cases, Doc also explores themes of love, loss and starting over. All of which Piccioni knows well.

He sustained damage from the crash to the left part of his head behind his brain and to the other side, in the front of his brain. The result, he says, led to “a change of character, a change of personality, a change of way of life.”

Piccioni learned that where before the crash he had been hard-charging and hard-hearted, now he was different, more open.

Such brain injuries are exceedingly rare: Piccioni says that of the approximately 80,000 people he saw as a medical chief, only about 200 had traumatic amnesia.

“I never heard a story like mine before the accident,” he says. “After the accident, I met more people with the same problem. Now I have 21 patients who have a story similar to me.”

He knew he wanted to return to his career, but without his memories he had to go back to school to relearn everything he was taught during those dozen years. He worked with doctors, physical therapists and psychological therapists to regain his physical and mental capacity and to try to regain his memories. He even did electrostimulation on his brain. But nothing worked.

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As he combed over more than 65,000 emails to discover who he was before the crash, he realized he wasn’t a very nice man.

“I was a very cold-eyes guy, very bad,” he says. “Colleagues of mine gave me a nickname: I was the ‘prince of bastards.’ ”

Piccioni says that what many people don’t understand is that when you lose your memories, you also lose the emotions attached to those experiences. Video and photographs can help paint a picture of a forgotten moment. But there are no still emotions attached, no real connection to the person who went through it.

Having 12 years of his past erased was liberating in a way, he says.

“When you lose the memory, you lose the good and bad. Of course I should like to have back the beautiful memories. But life is a bit of both, and I’m not sure I want back the bad memories and emotions,” he says. “I saw videos, slides, pictures when I was the prince of bastards. That doc was another kind of person, and I didn’t recognize myself.”

Piccioni struggled with the grief of losing his sons’ childhood, so he went about making new memories, often doing the things they had done together when the men were children.

“Day by day, week by week, we try to connect ourselves with the passions that were there before — the soccer, the music, the movies,” Piccioni says of his sons, now 35 and 32. “For them, again the same experience. For me, it was the first time.”

As he rebuilt his life, he tried to create new beautiful memories with “my guys, my wife, my work and with my friends.”

When he returned to practicing medicine about two years after the accident, his patients joked that if they had known his brain damage would make him so nice, they would have given him a kick in the head themselves.

“Everybody tells me I’m more empathetic. Not more clever, but a more beautiful person,” he says. “The trauma gave me a second chance.”

And he is grateful for his wife, a psychologist and “the most important person” to him. He calls her his “new wife.”

“She fell in love with her’ new’ husband and I fell in love a second time with my wife. I was very lucky,” Piccioni says.

Now, he says, he hopes to be a “carrier of hope” for people who face seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their lives.

“I’m very grateful to God,” he says. “A lot of people told me, ‘Doc, you are finished. You are over.’ But my message is — never give up.”

Doc airs Tuesdays (9 p.m ET) on Fox and is available to stream starting Wednesdays on Hulu.

Read the original article on People